Erotos

Visceral, mechanical, textural, Erotos is flesh and tongues and gears and screenwash, all motorcar and gastropod and sensation. Rhythmic, frantic, damp, it smears itself upon the screen with a fullness of sound and a stark black and white, snails and slime and shells and warm leatherette.

Gregory Montaldo's film is a reaction to sex scenes that are "too short and beautiful", an attempt to create a contrast between the "really well orchestrated" "sex scenes we watch" and the act itself, here recreated in scuzzy monochrome (with occasional colour over-lay) to "avoid the obsecenity of flesh".

There's a Ballardian note - not just the proximity of the automotive to the ostensibly procreative, but in the sound - the note that drives the rhythm of the piece is wet, organic, close - the click of his own jaw.

In Q&A the creator advised he hopes audiences would be "excited, but not too much", and certainly there was a reaction to it - by focusing on the flesh, perhaps here even the new flesh, Montaldo has to some extent revealed the horror of the body as a thing itself. If it weren't for dopamine and seretonin you wouldn't enjoy anything at all, and while there's enough distance and artifice to make Erotos as constructed as the other depictions that it's reacting to, it's treading a line already drawn by phrases like 'the beast with two backs'. It won't give you cooties, it will elicit reaction, but it's not worth losing an entire evening in pursuit of it.